Across Time: Across Time Book 1

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  It's shocking to consider I could have a child like me. I love Marie, and I liked her mom, but I still don't want to bring another of us into the world.

  Marie isn’t dissuaded in the least. Her face is, instead, vivid with excitement. “I could leave tomorrow and be back in a week,” she says. “I just want to know where she went. I'm not planning to run into a burning building.”

  Henri raises a brow. “If you saw our mother in a burning building you absolutely would go in after her.”

  Her mouth purses. She doesn’t deny it. And I watch the weight on Henri’s shoulders grow, because he knows Marie is not capable of being rational where her mother is concerned. She needs someone older and wiser there to make sure she doesn't do anything stupid, and he’s not able to be that person.

  But I could be.

  I hear Kit’s words again. See her desperate face, shivering with cold in the coffin she will never leave: You have to find them. And suddenly I know, deep in my heart, that it was always supposed to happen this way. That the them I was supposed to help was never Henri and Marie, at least not in the way I hoped.

  I meet Henri's eyes across the table, a wordless apology for what I'm about to say, before I turn to Marie. "I'll go with you."

  "No," he growls. "Absolutely not.”

  I lean forward, silently pleading with him to understand. “She needs someone there to watch her back, and there’s strength in numbers,” I tell him. “Like she said, we’re not going there to wage war. She just needs to see how the story ends.”

  He slams his hand on the table. “If you’re going to jump anywhere, you should be jumping home! Dammit, Amelie! Every time a dangerous situation presents itself you seem to be right there, insisting on becoming part of it.”

  Marie, too, is shaking her head. “I don’t want you to do that. You just came back to him. I know I’ve been awful lately, but the two of you deserve some happiness. Especially if things are about to get as bad as you say.”

  “If it’s no big deal, then it should be no big deal for me to come with you,” I reply.

  She bites her lip. “I can’t stop you, and I suppose it would be helpful to have someone who knows how to drive.”

  Henri’s chair scrapes across the floor. He walks out of the house without a word to either of us, slamming the door behind him.

  “He’s going to be panicked until you’re home safe again,” Marie says, watching the door.

  My heart twists. I never dreamed that returning here would make his life so much harder. “Then we should probably go right away. Do you have a plan in mind?”

  She rubs a finger over her lower lip. “I’m not sure how long we’ll need to recover once we arrive.”

  She’s being diplomatic, using the term we. Jumping back a few decades won’t affect her at all. I’m the problem. “It’ll take me a day, I think. Two at most.”

  She nods. “So we should aim for November 11th, since she told you to go on the 12th. We’ll jump back and stay in the barn,” she says. “We can sleep in the loft until you’re strong enough. My mother will be in the process of giving birth, so I doubt we’ll be seen.”

  I stare at her across the table. “Marie, I need to come back to him, okay? We both do.”

  “Of course,” she says. “I just want to watch from a distance. I just need to know for certain…that she’s gone.”

  I think of the hour after Kit drowned. How I dove, looking for her, and screamed, and flailed, long after it was too late. I’m not quite sure Marie understands the way desperation will make you do insane things.

  “You’ve got to promise that no matter what you see, you’ll only watch. If you decide to intervene, I’ll have to as well.”

  She reaches for my hands. “I want to know what happened to my mother,” she says. “But what matters most is that you come home to Henri. I swear I’ll put you first.”

  I don’t want her to put me first. I want her to put herself first. But if protecting me is what will keep her safe, so be it.

  I find Henri out by our hay bale, staring at the moon.

  I sit beside him and pull his hand into my lap as I rest my head on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," I tell him. "I hate that I’m making you worry.”

  His lips brush my hair. “My mother used to tell me when I was younger that I should enjoy my life while I could, because once I fell in love, I’d never know a day that was completely without fear. Now I see what she meant.”

  Have I made a mistake? Perhaps I should have just left him alone, to marry a normal girl and lead a normal life. “It never occurred to me I’d be making your life harder when I came back here.”

  “My life was going to be hard whether you were here or not. And if worry is the price to have you, I will gladly pay it.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” I promise him. “Marie and I talked it out. We’ll watch from a distance. If there’s even a hint of trouble, we’ll leave. She’ll be gone three days at most. It might take me a bit longer, since I have to recover there a day or two, but that’s a worst-case scenario.”

  His hands dig in his hair. “That’s hardly the worst-case scenario,” he says, his eyes dark as night. “When will you go?”

  He isn’t going to like my answer, but we definitely need to get it done as soon as possible. Not simply because of the stress this is causing him, but because I suspect that even after Marie knows her mother isn’t coming back, she’s not going to want to move. Not when Father Edouard remains here. And we’ve now got less than a year before the war begins.

  “Tomorrow. I just want to get it over with.”

  He flinches. “You said we’d be married before you jumped again.”

  I rest my head on his shoulder, wishing he truly understood how I feel about him. “A piece of paper isn’t what’s going to bring me back to you.”

  “No, but when you’re not here it’s all I’ll have to prove you were mine.”

  Were. The word sits uneasily in stomach. “You make it sound like I’m not coming back.”

  He stares at the ground. “I will never know for certain that you are, any time you leave. And…” he stops himself, shaking his head. “I have a bad feeling about this. Perhaps it’s because I just got you back, or because I’m so close to having everything I want in the world. But I wish you’d reconsider.”

  I can’t say his words don’t give me pause. But what option do we have? “Marie is going whether I’m there or not. And neither of us will be able to live with ourselves if we let her go alone and she doesn’t come back.”

  He rises and begins to pace. Unable to agree, unable to disagree.

  I follow him, resting my head on his back, wrapping my arms around his chest. “I swear I’ll return,” I whisper. “Go pick up the papers. I’ll marry you the minute I’m home.”

  He remains silent. I slide my hands away, preparing to retreat, and he spins, catching me and pulling me tight against him, finding my mouth. I feel his desperation in the pace of his breath, in the urgency of his hands. In the fingers, making quick work of my buttons, of his belt and his pants. He lifts me to the side of the barn and pushes inside me so fast and so hard that I forget how to breathe. He’s acting as if our time is about to run out.

  And suddenly I’m no longer certain it isn’t.

  33

  Neither Henri nor I get much sleep. I know he’s exhausted, but when I wake with a start in the middle of the night, he’s lying there watching me, like it’s a deathbed vigil. I pull him on top of me, and it’s just as urgent, as desperate, as it was before.

  When it’s over he presses his mouth to my eyelids and tells me to sleep, but he’s still watching me when my eyes open again, just as the first rays of light flicker over the barn. I dress and walk into the kitchen, where Marie sits, flushed with excitement. This is a problem—I want Marie cautiously optimistic at best. Cautiously being the key word.

  “You look like a kid waiting for Santa to come,” I sigh.

  She smiles, with an embarrassed
shrug. “I’m about to see my mother again. For the first time in three years. Who wouldn’t be excited by that?”

  I wouldn’t, for one. “Marie…” I begin.

  She raises a hand to stop me. “Yes, I know. We’re just watching from a distance. I won’t go after her. I won’t even speak to her. Just let me have my happiness, Amelie. There’ve been too few of these moments since she left.”

  Henri walks into the room and she bounces up. “Are we ready to go then?”

  His jaw grinds. I know he’s struggling with his resentment—none of this would be happening if it weren’t for her. But none of this would be happening if it weren’t for me either.

  “You go first,” I tell her. There’s no point in trying to go together since the jump through time is always a solo enterprise. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Henri hugs his sister and quietly asks her to be careful. She hugs him back. “Amelie will be perfectly safe. I promise.”

  And with a quick, hopeful grin at me, she vanishes.

  I swallow. I don’t dare jump from the house. With my luck I’d land inside it in 1918. I hold out my hand. “Walk me to the barn?”

  His fingers slide through mine, all his worry and fear in the pressure he exerts. We walk slowly, unwillingly. When we reach my jumping point, he turns me toward him. “I would give anything in the world for this to not be happening.”

  I wrap my arms around his neck, press my lips to his. “A week from now we’ll be married and it will all be behind us. Our biggest problem will be finding somewhere warm enough to honeymoon.”

  He clutches me to him. “Swear to me you’ll find your way back. No matter what happens, no matter how long it takes, you’ll return.”

  I press my mouth to his. “Of course I will. You just need to promise you’ll wait.”

  His eyes close. “I will wait for you until my dying breath.”

  The travel is difficult this time. I pop back evenly through the years, but have to proceed at a painfully slow rate once I reach 1919. From there I count back months and then days until I reach November 11th, 1918.

  I land. My head is heavy and my body aches. Sleep calls to me, but not as badly as it has with other jumps. I'm able to stagger up to the barn, but just as I reach it, I hear the small, joyous cry of a child. I slide into a dark corner, and watch a little boy chasing chickens through the yard with their feed, shouting "Poulet, poulet poulet!"

  Henri, at age three, dark-haired and rosy-cheeked.

  I feel a burst of love for him, but there’s grief in it too. He's so young and innocent and unburdened. He has no idea that his father is dead, that his mother will disappear on him. Or that the girl he will love might leave him and never return.

  It's the fatigue, I'm certain, that has me weeping. I slide down the side of the wall, shivering and watching his small legs recede in the distance.

  "Amelie," Marie whispers from the top of the loft. "Can you get up here?"

  I force my head in the motion of a nod, though even that seems more effort than I'm capable of. I crawl to the ladder and cling to the first rail. There are at least fifteen rungs to go and I’m exhausted already. I get to the second and rest my head.

  “Think of my brother right now,” Marie urges. “He’s worried sick for you, and all you need to do is climb a few more rungs to safety.”

  I nod and grab the next, and the one after that. I'm so weak. So terrible at this. How did I ever think I could help her at all?

  “Don’t think,” she says. “Just move. Now.”

  So I do, somehow, and when I get close enough she grabs my hand and drags me the rest of the way. She is already clothed, in a dress that sweeps her ankles.

  "Come," she says, "I've got you some clothes."

  "Sleep," I reply, and plant face first into the hay.

  When I wake it is dusk, and I’m somehow dressed and bundled under a pile of blankets with Marie snuggled against me. Between her and the hay and blankets, it's almost warm enough. Certainly warm enough for me to fall soundly back to sleep.

  When I rise again, it is fully dark—I'm not sure of the hour but it has that heaviness of the middle of the night, when nothing good happens—and Marie is gone.

  "Marie," I hiss.

  There is no response. My heart rate begins to pick up, imagining worst-case scenarios, but given that I don’t see her clothes lying around I can at least rule out the worst of all: that she time traveled somewhere without me.

  I convince myself she’s just heeding nature’s call and fall back into fitful sleep. It feels like only minutes later that Marie is kneeling by my side, trying to wake me. “It’s time to go,” she whispers. “Do you think you can make it back down the ladder?”

  I nod, pushing my hair off my face. "So what's the plan?" I ask. "You said you knew how we'd get to Paris."

  "I do," she says. "But it will involve some theft." For a woman who spends so much time at church, Marie has a very loose relationship with a few of the commandments.

  "What kind of theft?"

  "A car,” she says, wrapping food she's stolen in a blanket. "Madame and Monsieur Perot have the only car in town. I've heard people complain about how awful she was during the war. She wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone, so I don’t feel especially guilty depriving her of it.”

  I’m less troubled by the ethics of the situation than I am the legality. Spending a night or two in a French prison because I don’t have the strength to jump away is not particularly appealing. "Don't you think someone will notice if the only car in town is driving away?"

  "Well," she says, "they haven't noticed it yet. I've got it parked on the far side of the barn, but we should try to get close to Paris before it's light, I think."

  I groan. "My God, Marie. It's like you searched for ways to make everything riskier."

  "The term you seek, I believe, is resourceful. And you’re welcome. I just saved your barely mobile self from walking to Paris."

  I follow her down the ladder and out to the road. “How did you even get it here? You don’t know how to drive.”

  She points at the bashed-in front bumper and broken headlight. "I didn’t say I stole it well.”

  The car, for all its luxurious finishes, drives more like a tractor, with rudimentary gears and a steering wheel that takes unbelievable strength to turn. Fortunately, I learn how to drive it on mostly empty roads. Aside from a horse and cart I nearly run right into, we see almost no one.

  I laugh quietly to myself. “You realize you are the reason André’s grandmother will have a lifelong hatred of gypsies, right?”

  Marie shrugs, picking at some bread she stole from the Perots along with the car. "On ne fuit pas d'omelette sans casser des oeufs". You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

  It takes well over an hour to get to the city, driving as slowly as we must, and when we arrive just after dawn, our progress slows dramatically. I hadn’t realized that in 1918 there were still so many horses and carts. They don’t operate like carriages in New York City, which remain on paths in Central Park or stay off to the side of the street. They march right down the middle of the road as if they own it, and all I can do is roll along behind them, which gives me a chance to look around. There are few women out this early, but they definitely look like the product of another time: dresses that hit just above the ankle, and a kind of modesty in attire that will disappear entirely over the next decade.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” says Marie-Therese, voicing my thoughts, “how much things will change in just a few years?”

  I glance at her. “They change just as much between your time and mine,” I reply.

  “Is it entirely for the better?” she asks.

  I bite my lip. Life is so much better in my time for women, for minorities. But it’s grown less personal as well. “Mostly, but not entirely.”

  We weave through the city toward Sacré-Coeur, as Parc de la Turlure—where Marie’s mother would have headed—sits just behind it. Our pl
an is to wait there, beginning at sunset, for Madame Durand to arrive, and follow her as best we can. Though we are many hours ahead of schedule, it seems wisest to get the lay of the land before we do anything else.

  We park the car a few blocks away, and find Parc de la Turlure easily, just a stone’s throw from the basilica. To my dismay, the square is not nearly as small or uniform as I’d imagined. There are lots of large trees, with nooks and crannies between them, which means Madame Durand could easily disappear somewhere in here without us ever noticing.

  “I don’t like this,” I say quietly.

  Marie smiles, untroubled. “Look what I found,” she says, pulling a necklace away from her collarbone. “It was my mother’s. I found it in the pocket of my dress. I think it means we’ll have good luck today.”

  I hope she’s right. I somehow doubt it, however. “Let’s be cautious anyway.”

  Marie shrugs as if the admonition is obvious, but she’s already ahead of me again and walking too quickly for me to keep up with, given how leaden I am from the trip here.

  "Marie," I hiss. "Slow down."

  She turns back to me with a giddy smile. "I'm sorry," she says, clasping my hand once, quickly. "I'm just so excited. In a few hours from now, I will lay eyes on my mother again."

  “Not if we don’t get a better vantage point,” I reply. “There are too many hidden corners here.”

  "The rooftops?” she suggests, glancing up to the right.

  I smile. “How do you plan to get up there, Spiderman?” Even if we could reach the roof, there are so many trees that no view is perfect.

  “Spiderman? I don’t know this word. But you make a good point.” She shrugs. “So when we come back this evening, we will stake out the main entrances. You’ll take one and I’ll take the other.”

  Already she is ignoring our agreement to stay together, and I barely have the energy left to argue with her. Why is this so much harder for me than her? She has enough energy for a village of time travelers while I can barely keep my eyes open.